Stefanie Fuchsloch / Gerret von Nordheim / Karin Boczek

Unlocking Digitized Public Spheres: Research Opportunities and Legal Challenges in the Use of Text Mining for Content Analysis

Analyzing communication processes on social media platforms requires new methods, e.g. text mining, to gain insights. However, in text mining research projects, various legal areas must be taken into account when collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing the selected text corpora. For instance, contract law might be relevant when agreeing to terms and conditions. If text corpora contain pictures, newspaper articles, or parts of a database, the Copyright and the Database Directive might be applicable. In this article, we use examples of text mining research projects to illustrate the current legal uncertainty. As there is a new proposal of the EU Copyright Directive which includes an exception for text and data mining, we look at this exception, before we discuss further problems of data access and data dependency. The aim of the article is to illustrate the current European reform processes as a unique moment for researchers to indicate legal challenges of research projects.

AUTOREN DIESES BEITRAGS

Stefanie Fuchsloch, born 1988, is a PhD student at the Institute for Journalism at Technische Universität Dortmund. She studied European economic law (LL.M.) and media management (B.A.). Prior to that, she completed an apprenticeship as paralegal in judicial services. Her research focus is the European media and Internet law (e.g. ...

Gerret von Nordheim is a postdoc researcher at TU Dortmund University and the University of Hamburg. His research interest is focused on applications of text mining/NLP-algorithms for the analysis of (social) media content. He is a trained multimedia journalist and a lecturer for different journalism schools and the media authority ...

Karin Boczek, born 1986, studied journalism studies, social and economic sciences. She is a PhD student at the Institute for Journalism at Technische Universität Dortmund (Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftspolitischen Journalismus). Her main research interests are text mining, economic journalism and user comments. ...